Digested week: cheap meat and Corfe Castle – a toast to Brexit five years on

The Guardian

07-02-2025

Why all the long faces? Just a few days ago it was the fifth anniversary of the UK leaving the EU, so how come we didn't have a weekend of celebrations? The Labour government marked the occasion by choosing to ignore it entirely. As if it had never happened. The Tories were also rather muted, with Kemi Badenoch keeping a low profile. Even Nigel Farage was sotto voce. His statement merely noted that Brexit would have gone a great deal better if the Tories had managed it better. As usual, Nige was taking no personal responsibility for anything.
So it's left to me to toast the many successes of the Brexit project. To sound a note of triumphalism. Here's just a few. First, the trade deals. Why do people get so hung up about the 4% drop in GDP when we are now a member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership? Give it 10 years of so and we might increase our GDP by 0.01%. Surely that's something to get excited about.
Then there's the trade deal with Australia that allows Aussie farmers to dump cheap meat in the UK. Brexit wasn't all about improving our trade, it was about giving a boost to the Commonwealth as well. Job done. Nor must we forget the increased regulations. As Chris Philp recently pointed out, most British workers are terminally lazy. That's why we now make exporters fill in tens of millions of completely unnecessary forms each year. The EU had made us idle. Brexit has restored the work ethic.
And thank God we got rid of the youth mobility scheme. All those young people wandering around Europe, having a good time in Florence or Barcelona. Eating pasta and tapas. That had to stop. Fraternising with Europeans when they could have been looking at Corfe Castle in the rain. If God had wanted us to speak a foreign language, he would have made us foreign. What's the point of being an island nation if we're going to waste time on the European mainland? Finally, there are the lengthy queues at European airports. Queueing is uniquely British and it's good to show the French and Germans how to do it properly. Call it soft power. Chin up, everyone.
Even by his usual reality-bending, incoherent standards, the latest intervention from Donald Trump was spectacularly wild. For the US to own Gaza, to kick out the 1.8 million Palestinians and turn the territory into the Riviera of the Middle East. Golf courses and casinos wherever you look. Foreign policy reduced to a real estate deal. This didn't just take the rest of the world by surprise, it also caught his supporters off guard. Trump had campaigned on a ticket of non-intervention on the global stage.
There again, maybe The Donald is a mystery to himself. You often get the impression that the words tumble out of his mouth of their own accord and that he has no idea of what he is going to say until after he has said it. So he's constantly playing catchup with himself. Either way, the fallout was predictable, with every country in the Middle East bar Israel, along with many others around the world, insisting the US plan was never going to happen. It broke with the Geneva conventions and amounted to ethnic cleansing. Bizarrely, Trump then announced that everyone loved the plan and that it was definitely going to happen. Just with no US money or boots on the ground. We were now through the other side of the looking-glass.
Keir Starmer's response was instructive. He has clearly given a lot of thought to how to deal with the president and has decided to take the indulgent-parent approach. Shower him with praise and then suggest a few minor tweaks. So Keir declared The Donald was ahead of the game in realising Gaza was now rubble. He himself had never noticed that before. The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, adopted a similar approach by saying he had never known Greenland existed before Trump brought it to his notice. Perhaps this is the way forward.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has recently been complaining that the Chinese have been scraping his data to train their own AI engine DeepSeek. Copyright theft on an industrial scale. I guess Sam should know what he's talking about as OpenAI ransacked the internet to get its own engine up and running. Along the way, he powered his way through several hundred thousand books without asking the authors' permission or offering a payment. Instead, he just stole everyone's intellectual property. Including mine. A friend directed me to a website where you could find out whether your own books had been part of the grand larceny. And, sure enough, several of my books had been chosen to be immortalised on various giant servers somewhere out in the desert. Fame of sorts, I suppose.
More interesting is: what is my contribution to AI? What will future generations unknowingly learn from me? From Vertigo: One Football Fan's Fear of Success they will learn that being a Spurs fan is a life sentence in disappointment. And it is the hope that finishes you off. Give it a year or two and they could find that out for themselves. From Brideshead Abbreviated, OpenAI will have found out how to parody 100 of the best books of the 20th century. Slightly niche, I would have thought. That just leaves several collections of my political sketches over the last 10 years. I guess even AI needs to develop a sense of humour. Much like Westminster.
Sometimes the sketch is a straightforward transcription service. Another lobby friend recently tested DeepSeek by asking it to write a sketch about Chris Philp in the style of John Crace. It was disturbingly good. Apart from one thing. It thought the Tories were still in government and that Philp was still a minister. My job is safe for a little while yet, I hope.
Yet again I seem to find myself out of sync with the rest of the world. Research conducted by scientists at University College London and published in the British Medical Journal Mental Health has found that people are at their happiest when they wake up in the morning. Thereafter, the day seems to slip away from them and they feel progressively worse. By the time it gets to midnight, they are wondering why they even bothered to engage with the world. They would have been better off staying in bed all day watching TV on their laptops. There were some variations, as you might expect: people felt generally more chipper at weekends and on holiday, but the general principle applies: if you're feeling crap, try not to dwell on it. Just go to sleep and you will wake up in a better mood.
All of which is the precise opposite of my own biorhythms. I dread waking up each morning because that is when I am at my worst. When I am most in the grip of my anxiety. I often feel so anxious it is a struggle to get out of bed. The urge to hide under the duvet is almost irresistible.
Frequently I have to give myself a strong talking to. Reduce the morning to small increments. Minor achievements. Check phone. Get dressed. Go downstairs. Have breakfast. Answer texts and emails. Leave house. Once I've done all this, I find my anxiety is more or less manageable. I can get on with the day. Enjoy what I am doing at work. Have fun with friends and colleagues. Go to the gym. By the time I get home, I'm at my most relaxed. Ready even for something as brain dead as Silent Witness. Talking of which, the season finale was so bad it was a must-watch. Jack and Nikki's wedding was hysterical. Awkward dancing in Trafalgar Square. Two people with no obvious attraction to one another. Bring on season 29.
The older I get, the more I want to mark important milestones. Maybe I'm getting more sentimental, or maybe it's a realisation that I may not have so many of these occasions left as I would like and I want to make the best of them. So I should point out that we are very close to the anniversary of my heartache. My very own unwanted memento mori. Obviously some memories have faded in time. I can't remember the faces of those in the hospital beds next to me. But a lot is still vivid. The feelings of terror. Of being out of control. The consultant, doctors and nurses who looked after me and saved my life. The notion of time appearing to slow down.
To all intents and purposes, I am now a well man. My artery has been unblocked. My heart is functioning well in stress tests. My blood results are normal. I take all my meds with the devotion of a man who has been given a second chance. And yet … something important has changed. I feel more vulnerable than I ever did before. There is not a day goes by without me thinking of my heart attack. It's always just beneath the surface of my thoughts. Sometimes when I am heading off to work, I find myself wondering if I will make it back home. Whenever I am in the gym – the place where I had my heart attack – I am always on the lookout for chest pains. Most of all, I feel like I have been given a chronicle of a death foretold. As if I know how I am going to die. All that's left to be decided is when.